Shazam! Old Navy Campaign Links TV, Mobile

There are plenty of people playing, tweeting and multitasking on their smartphones while watching television commercials. For its new, music-driven advertising campaign, Old Navy has enlisted music-identifying service Shazam to deepen the connection among the ads, the brand and the consumers.

"[Old Navy] saw mobile as a pretty important element of their campaign in general," Evan Krauss, executive vice president of advertising sales at Shazam, tells Marketing Daily
. "What we saw was a way to take that immense reach and spend of TV and make it clickable."

For the campaign, which launches via television commercials Thursday, people can use the Shazam app on their phones to tag the original music from the ads, launching a virtual store where they can view the fashions from the ads, download the music and even purchase the clothing featured in the ads, Krauss says. The idea for the mobile component came out of company research showing that half of Old Navy's customers owned smartphones and 20% of those owners were using them while watching TV, Krauss says.

"There's lots and lots of people queued up with the mobile phones, watching the TV and multitasking," he says. "In the Old Navy case, you can literally shop from your phone while sitting on your couch after watching the ads."

In addition to using the app while watching the Old Navy videos on television and online, customers can also use it to tag the music playing in the stores. Those tagging the songs could win various products in promotional giveaways as well as receive style and shopping tips while in the store, Krauss says. For Old Navy, the entire mobile program is a way to not only engage people, but also to reward them for being "social and interactive," Krauss says.

Old Navy is promoting the Shazam tie-in with an animated tag at the end of the commercial encouraging people to use the app, as well as through in-store signage and updates through the company's social media streams, Krauss says.

Last year, Shazam, which boasts 100 million users and is one of the most popular iPhone apps, partnered with Levi's on a taggable Super Bowl spot in which viewers tagging the commercial were taken to a special Dockers site where they could learn more about the product and register for promotions. For Shazam, the Old Navy program, which works on a much broader and longer-range scale than the Levi's partnership, is about finding a way to monetize its 100 million user base, Krauss says.

"This is less about getting users," Krauss says. "This is about enhancing our business model."